(Psalm 95:6-11, Psalm 127:1-2; Hebrews 4:1-13)
Sara and I have gotten a lot of congratulations (and the occasional snarky comment) since we started telling people we’re going to have another child, and the congratulations are certainly appropriate and appreciated; I think, too, they’re a sign of health in this community, because children truly are a blessing from God, which is something our society seems to understand less and less these days. In our growing individualism and exaltation of the self, our culture more and more focuses on the inconvenience and burden that children represent, and the way in which they make you vulnerable to hurt, and misses the sheer wonder of the opportunity to love and know another person. That’s the wrong focus, and it’s an ungrateful response to the abundant goodness of God; and six months from now, when I’m trying to function on four hours’ sleep a night in three pieces, I pray you’ll remind me of that fact.
In all seriousness, the lack of rest that comes with a newborn takes a real toll on Sara and me both; I won’t call it one of the hardest things about parenting because it’s such a short-term thing, but man, you really feel it while it lasts. We need rest; our bodies need it, and so do our spirits, and if we don’t get enough, it takes its toll. Someone was telling me recently about a couple Navy friends who had tried to join the SEALs, but had washed out, for different reasons—one because he discovered a severe allergy to poison ivy, as I recall; of course, they try very hard to wash people out, and only accept those they can’t get rid of. One of the ways they do that is through extended sleep deprivation, pushing people far beyond what their bodies can really handle to see if they break. One of the stories I heard was of a prospective SEAL standing in the forest, trying to use a tree to make a long-distance phone call; lack of sleep had fogged his brain to the point that he could barely think. We need rest for our minds and bodies to function properly.
The problem is, we know this, but various things interfere. There’s strong economic pressure these days, if you have a job, to work whenever they ask—especially in businesses that can let employees go and just have others work longer hours to make up for it. People wind up working long, long days, or seven days a week, or both, because they feel they have to in order to stay employed. Others work erratic schedules with no rhythm to them, no consistent time for rest, because those are the hours they can get. I remember doing that, back when I was searching for my first call, working as a relief chaplain at our hospital; I remember times when I was there at 3, 4 in the morning. There are a lot of folks for whom work runs their lives, while rest is largely an afterthought.
This is a problem in better economic times, too, of course; the desperation isn’t quite the same, but the opportunities for economic advancement are better, and the carrot works at least as well as the stick when it comes to getting the mule to move. Someone once asked the great tycoon Andrew Carnegie how much was enough, and he replied, “One dollar more”; it’s an attitude shared by an awful lot of people. It’s easy to figure that we can rest when we just achieve the next goal, whatever that next goal may be—but if we get there, there’s always another one just up ahead, and yet another beyond that, and always one more mountain yet to climb before we can really sit down and rest.
For the world, rest is dependent on circumstances, and I don’t say that’s entirely unreasonable; true rest, after all, goes with true work—God gave us work to do just as much as he gave us time and space to rest. He gave us both because we need both to flourish. Work without rest is unbalanced, bad for the body and the spirit; but rest without work is even worse, because those who refuse to do good work do not find good rest, but only a counterfeit that sickens the soul. Those who feel they cannot do good work find their rest blighted; you can really see that in our shut-ins, which is why I often need to reassure them that their prayers matter, and we treasure them. (In the first draft of this sermon, I wrote “if nothing else, they can pray”; Sara read that, and God started convicting her that for all of us, prayer is the first and most important work he gives us. I looked at her and wondered why God hadn’t simply convicted me of that, and the answer is of course that he believes in efficiency, and this was a two-fer: he fixed my thinking, and at the same time reminded me how much I need my wife. Which I knew, but it never hurts.) Whatever the work God gives us, we need to do it for our own sake; the need for rest arises with the need to work, it isn’t an excuse to avoid work.
The problem is, though, we don’t understand what rest really is, and where we truly find it. When we think about this through an economic prism, as the world does, we essentially think of rest as a reward, something we have to earn; that misleads us in two ways. One, we get work and rest out of their proper balance—either by yielding to that way of thinking, which produces overwork, or by rebelling against it, into laziness and sloth—and two, that leads us to define rest in purely physical and material terms. Rest is a day off, a vacation, a morning to sleep in, a time to go do something fun. Which is all good and necessary for body and spirit alike, but it’s not enough. If you’ve ever had a day off where you couldn’t get your mind off work, no matter what your body was doing, or a vacation where you came back more exhausted than you left because you were frantically busy the whole time, you understand that—rest isn’t just a matter of your physical circumstances, it’s a matter of the attitude of your mind and your heart.
This is an important reality, and it points us to what Hebrews is doing here in chapter 4. The author, in the warning that concludes chapter 3, has pulled this passage from Psalm 95—God’s people rebel against him in the wilderness, refusing to trust him, and so he bars them from the Promised Land; and how is that phrased? Not, “They shall not enter my land,” but “They shall not enter my rest.” It’s an interesting statement, and the author picks up on it to argue two things. First, he notes that this is God’s rest, and like any good Jewish teacher, he goes looking in the Bible for God’s rest, which he finds in Genesis 2:2—“God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” God’s rest is the Sabbath rest, which he commanded to his people in his Law.
What does that mean? It means to do as God did, to rest from all our works. It means laying down our own efforts, letting go of our striving, taking the burden off our shoulders and setting it down. It doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing—though there are times when that can be important—which is why it’s not supposed to be a legalistic observance, because it’s not physical inactivity that’s the main point; what matters more is the heart attitude of rest. Obviously, stepping aside from one’s job is necessary to this, but simply not going in to work is meaningless in this sense if you take your work and its worries home with you; if you’re still focused on your expenses and what you have to get done and how you’re going to pay the bills, if you’re still trying to carry your life on your back, then you aren’t experiencing God’s rest, and you have no true Sabbath.
The key here is the understanding we see in Psalm 127: what matters most isn’t what we do, but what God does. If it’s just your work, it’s going to collapse sooner or later, no matter your frantic efforts to prop it up; but if God is in it, you can leave it in his hands, and go rest, because you can trust that he can keep it going just fine without you.
Again, this is partly a matter of physical circumstances, because one of the ways God does this is by providing for us physically and financially. The promise of rest in the Exodus, after all, was entrance into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey where making a living would be easier than most places. One of the ways we know God is building this church is that he has provided us over the years with gifts of money that have enabled us to keep going and keep doing his ministry until, as I believe, the day comes when that ministry will bear fruit and we will have the people we need to be self-sustaining, and indeed to grow the ministries he has given us. More broadly, as he gave the Promised Land to his people, so he has given us the country for whose freedom we give thanks at this time every year; our constitutional protections and our economic strength make rest much easier than someplace like Haiti, or Iran, or Zimbabwe, or North Korea. The fact that we often turn them into new and creative reasons to stress out instead doesn’t change that. Our political and economic blessings are among the ways God provides for us, and we should always be grateful for them.
That said, we need to understand what Hebrews is telling us: that’s only part of the picture. These are gifts God gives us, but we must not focus on the gifts, because they aren’t enough; we need to focus through them to the one from whom all good things come, because more than the gifts, we need the giver. As the author points out here, if Israel entering the Promised Land had been enough to fulfill God’s promise of rest, God wouldn’t have needed to keep making the promise. There’s more, and better; there’s a truer, deeper Sabbath rest than anything merely physical; and that rest is found in Jesus. Jesus, as he is superior to all other spiritual powers, as he is superior to all other authorities in heaven and on earth, as he is superior even to the Law of God, so he is superior even to the greatest earthly blessing of that Law, the Sabbath; he is the true Sabbath rest, the final fulfillment of that promise.
Why? Because Jesus gives grace, and he gives it to us to live by grace. If we’re trying to live by our own efforts, we can never truly rest, because there’s always more that we urgently need to do; there’s always one more problem coming down the pike, and one more opportunity not to miss, and one more sin we haven’t beaten, and one more area where we need to improve. If it’s just us guarding the walls, then sleep is a risk we can’t afford. But Jesus tells us, it isn’t just us; we aren’t on our own in this. We keep trying to be big enough, strong enough, smart enough, fast enough, good enough, and the burden of needing to be enough crushes us under the weight of musts and shoulds and regrets; Jesus tells us we don’t have to be enough, because he is enough for us. All we have to do is what he gives us to do, and trust him for the rest.